Create Research Dashboards

This is for librarians or people who support other researchers. If your organization doesn’t have an intranet – or even if it doesn’t – this might be something interesting to use. Middlespot creates a Web-based dashboard that you can customize to share resources.

It supports the addition of both live and flat content. For example, as you can see in the screenshot below, there is a live Web page (library search engine) with a downloadable PDF next to it. You could list papers or frequently sought after content for easy download in addition to Web pages. I added an RSS feed (using Feed43.com) to the dash as well. You can create multiple dashboards and, because they are stored online, you can access them from any computer. Dashboards can be either public or private. Free accounts are limited to 25 MB in content.

The company appears to be shifting from a digital newsletter or booklet site (check out Simplebooklet.com ) and it shows that they’re not really focused on shared dashboards. It would be nice to create groups to share a given dashboard with, rather than just public or private. It’s an interesting idea, and the size of the canvas can hold a ton of content.